3Brain BioCAM X, User Manual

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Data formats
BrainWave X works with two main file types although it can export data in other formats. Those two own
file types are BRW- and BXR-files. Both file types are using HDF5 hierarchical data format (
hdfgroup.
org ). You can easily open them within most operating systems (including Windows, Linux and Mac OS)
and most used data analysis environments, such as, among others, Python, Matlab, Scilab, Octave and
R. You can find detailed documentation on both data files on 3brain.com/downloads#documentation .
BRW stands for Brainwave RaW data file and contains continuous or qua -
si-continuous data streamed from the BioCAM. BRW files, according to your
acquisition settings, can contain for instance raw data recorded from all the
BioChip MEA channels or a temporal subset of those data. In what follows
you will learn to record plain raw data file.
BXR stands for Brainwave eXperiment Result data file and contains discrete
data obtained by analyzing and processing the raw data. BXR files can for
instance contain the timestamps of the detected spikes. In the following
section you will learn to create a BXR-file starting from a BRW-file.
Conceptually, a BXR-file is created starting from a BRW-file, hence a BXR-file is associated and linked
to its parent BRW-file (while it is not true that a BRW-file is linked to a BXR-file). BXR-file can be deleted
and recreated starting from the BRW-file, while if a BRW-file is deleted the contained data is lost for
-
ever. However, since BRW-file are typically large files containing a huge amount of information, some -
times you might find useful to delete the BRW-file once the relevant results have been obtained and
saved in a BXR-file.